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Agency admits using faulty data on endangered Florida
panthers
3/22/05 |
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An adult male Florida panther growels. (AP
Photo/Gregory Smith)
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WASHINGTON
(AP) _ Criticized by a whistle-blower, the Fish and Wildlife Service
conceded Monday that it bungled some of the science used in
protecting Florida's endangered panthers.
The agency
acknowledged three violations of a 2000 law that is intended to
ensure the quality of data the government uses. Those involved
issuing documents based on faulty assumptions about the habitat of
one of the world's rarest animals, agency officials
said.
Steve Williams, the agency's outgoing director, reached
the conclusions as one of his last actions, based on a review by
three senior Interior Department officials.
Dan Ashe, the
service's top science adviser and a member of the review panel, said
the agency relied too much on data collected only in late morning
hours to establish the panthers' home range. Panthers are most
active at dawn and dusk. The agency said it now would protect more
variety of habitat, but not more acreage.
``I think the
service was slow in responding to the changing science,'' Ashe said.
``Those documents did not represent a complete and accurate picture
of Florida panther habitat needs.'' He said the agency will withdraw
and reissue several documents on the panthers.
About five
years ago, before the complaint was filed, the agency began
rethinking its assumptions about panther habitat by convening a
study group, said Sam Hamilton, a regional Fish and Wildlife
director in Atlanta. He said it's now believed the panther uses ``a
mosaic of habitats'' rather than just primarily
forests.
Because of that, said Jay Slack, who supervises Fish
and Wildlife's South Florida ecological services office in Vero
Beach, the agency will expand protections for more habitat such as
prairie, wetlands, pasture and rows of crops where other animals
feed.
``It's not just acreage, it's quality,'' Slack
said.
Officials stopped short of saying they had vindicated
Andrew Eller, a Fish and Wildlife biologist fired in November who
worked in Slack's office. Eller filed a whistle-blower complaint
that the agency used faulty science to approve development in
panther habitats.
``The word 'vindicate' is one of those
words people use when they're trying to make a point,'' said Ashe,
who called the agency's response an ``objective and independent
review'' of Eller's complaints.
Eller and Public Employees
for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group, jointly
challenged Fish and Wildlife in a petition last May under the Data
Quality Act.
Jeff Ruch, PEER's director, said his group was
``gratified, but constrained in that gratification, in that they're
persisting in firing the biologist who they now admit was
right.''
Ruch said he was concerned that corrections to the
data may not be made in time to stop 30 ``mega-projects,'' but
Hamilton called that ``a gross exaggeration or stretch of the
facts'' because he said those decisions would be made ``using best
science.''
Agency officials earlier had responded to Eller by
saying he was consistently late in completing his work and engaged
in unprofessional exchanges with the public. Eller described his
office in Vero Beach as understaffed and his firing as politically
motivated because he wanted to protect panthers from roads, houses
and other developers' projects.
The government created the
26,000-acre Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in 1989. That
and other measures have helped the panthers' population to roughly
quadruple over the last 25 years, but still there are only about 80
to 90 adults and a few dozen kittens, Fish and Wildlife officials
estimate.
The breeding population is considered to be below
50, the minimum required to sustain the population. Almost half of
the panthers' habitat is on private property spread across several
southwestern Florida counties.
___
On the Net:
Fish and Wildlife
Service
Florida
Panther Net
Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility
National Wildlife Federation
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